With this announcement comes a flurry of buzz: from the media, articles about the latest platforms, apps, software and other tools that will lead digital transformation; from companies, vague references to ‘digital’ in press releases; and from marketing departments, campaigns touting CTO and CMO initiatives investing in the latest technologies, branded as the ultimate solution to deploy ‘digital transformation.’

One of the biggest challenges today, is to deliver meaningful experiences that create value to brands and are valuable for the users. As UX and CX professionals we are today responsible for the value generation processes, because an experience is created by the understanding of what does value mean for all those involved in the experience: the brand and the users.

I recently gave a speech at UX Denmark 2016, the theme was trust & emotion. If trust is the willingness to take risks, where does trust come from and how can it be useful in the UX field? Trust is generated by interaction, there is no trust unless the parts have had – or are in the conditions of having – an interaction that can build and support a relationship that generates positive emotions.

Interaction generates trust and relationships, and relationships generate experiences, and experiences are the real value in the experience economy.

Therefore, if relationships are the (metaphorical) places where value is generated between the interacting parts, then the only way to be in a relationship is through an EXPERIENCE.

Experience is generated by experiences, and the design of future experiences requires imagination and the understanding of the perception of the present experiences through narratives and storytelling of the past.

The UX practices and mindsets are evolving. It’s becoming clear that UX is not just about user validation, pixels, or wireframes. That’s the old paradigm. UX is much more. UX permeates the whole design process and the overall underlying strategy. Because UX is strategy in action.

A little bit of history: do you remember when…?

For many years UX has been dominated by the design/wireframe and testing paradigm, and this is not a surprise.

Although stemming from HCI and UCD, the real turning point in the dissemination of a user centred culture was early 2000, when Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman have highlighted and explained the importance of usability and good design.

Like this:

UX is a mindset that connects strategy and design through the understanding of what is valuable and meaningful both for the users and the organisations. And in such a scenario, research is the link that allows organisation strategies to become experiences.

In an experience economy the value of a product or a service is not anymore limited to a price tag, but it is determined by the quality of the experiences delivered. This implies that organisations need to shift their focus from the product to embrace the intangible experiential elements and shape those elements to support the wider strategy through an effective and meaningful engagement with the users.

UX has helped global organizations to think and take into consideration how their users and customers interact with brands and companies through interfaces, digital services and the whole ecosystem. UX has also brought users closer to brands by involving user opinions.

However, when UX is in action, brands often leave UX to manage the conversation. UX researchers, consultants and designers often act as the man in the middle, interpreting both the brands’ goals and the users’ expectations. As much as UX accomplishes, global organizations are still not engaged and are still not talking with their customers.

This missing exchange is crucial. It has become clear, in fact, that customers are more focused on the experiential elements of a product and a brand than the product itself. As J. Pine and Gilmore put it, “An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.”

The key to bridging the conversation gap between Global companies and their customers is “co-creation.”

It was back in March 1999 when a group of forward thinking people published a revolutionary book based on 95 thesis that explained that the old business models were disrupted by internet and technologies. They said that markets were conversations,they explained that it was time to start listening to the consumers and to engage in conversations.

The book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, was a revolutionary and visionary text that clearly saw the direction technologies were taking society and the business. Internet and technologies dramatically changed in these 16 years, but every change reinforced the thesis of the Cluetrain Manifesto, proving how old business models were obsolete and could lead companies and business into a quick obsolescence.

[Excerpt. The full article is available on UXBooth. Many thanks to Marli Mesibov].

“In the past decade, new technologies ranging from Twitter to customer service chat-windows have led to an increase in the quantity and quality of interactions between people and organizations. But listening to user feedback isn’t where the company-user interactions end. Today more than 50% of Fortune 500 companies have made co-creation an integral part of their innovation strategy, as Andrew Welch—Chief Executive Officer of Y&R reports.

Yet in user experience design, most organizations take a traditional approach to user research and design, using a researcher to act as a middle-man between users, designers, and business stakeholders. Users are consulted in the process, but not given creative control over solutions.

In the past few years, we have assisted to a sort of divorce between users and organisations: technology has bought in a wide range of new behaviours and opportunities that companies are not always able to follow or predict. Most innovative projects fail because it’s difficult to fully understand what’s in the users’ heads (Leadbeater 2008) and the big changes society is facing, with a shift from products to experiences makes traditional UX approaches difficult, time-consuming and less effective.

To reduce complexity and make the overall internal and external process simpler and leaner, UX today can take advantage of collaborative approaches that involve and engages stakeholders, users, and designers in a creative and participative activity, namely co-creation.

Markets are ever more conversations and the role of the user has dramatically changed in the past decade, shifting from a passive unknown being, into active part of the conversation.

We live in convivial times where technology has enhanced new practices and new opportunities for organisations and users to talk, to understand their mutual points of view and share knowledge, meanings and values.

Nevertheless, there has been a divorce between users and organisations and much of those conversations are today limited to the final stage of product and service design. Rather than taking fully advantage of the potential of co-creation, and engage users in conversations and creative exercises, today users are involved only in the very final stage, when it comes to validate an idea that has been developed using traditional approaches.